New York Times - 8 Apr 08

A New Scenic Destination: That's Right, It's Fresh Kills

By SEWELL CHAN
Published: April 8, 2006

Forget the liquid ooze from New York City's garbage,
slowly seeping downward, five years after the last load of trash arrived
at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Don't mind the methane
gas, which is slowly percolating underground and which the city hopes to
harness someday to create electricity, and revenue.

The city's Department of Parks and Recreation will
offer monthly bus tours, starting at the end of this month, as part of
the effort to transform Fresh Kills, once the world's largest landfill,
into a vast park with picnic grounds, athletic fields and a giant
earthen monument to the Sept. 11 victims.

"This is a great way for New Yorkers to understand
the spectacular potential of Fresh Kills to become the great park of the
21st century," the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, said yesterday.
"Being on top of any of the mounds gives you a view unparalleled
anywhere in New York City. You have the feeling of being on an alpine
meadow."

Those mounds, of course, were formed by tons of trash
that accumulated over 53 years. The plan to transform the once-smelly
landfill into a park took a major step forward this week, with the
completion of a draft master plan that will guide construction on the
2,315-acre site.

The plan, released on Thursday by the Department of
City Planning, envisions five park areas to be built over 30 years: a
100-acre core, to be called the Confluence; a small North Park for the
residents of the Travis neighborhood; a South Park with varied terrain
for mountain biking, soccer and horseback riding; an East Park with a
golf course, a freshwater marsh and large art installations; and a West
Park with long-distance trails for running and even skiing, as well as
the 9/11 monument.

To get there, the planners must first erase the old
image of Fresh Kills.

"No one could really see Fresh Kills when it was a
landfill," said James Corner, a British landscape architect and urban
planner who is the chief designer of the new park. "All they saw was
the trash trucks and the sea gulls, and they smelled the stench. If you
could get visitors now and put them in a car or bus to go for a drive
around, they're totally blown away and surprised by their worst
expectations being supplanted by something that's actually pretty scenic
and beautiful."

Amanda M. Burden, the director of city planning, who
oversaw the plan, said the past few tours have helped to stimulate
public interest in the park. "The rolling wetlands, the hills and the
views are just breathtaking," she said. "It is one of the most
glorious sights, already, in the entire city, and it is totally
unique."

Ms. Burden said that Fresh Kills and the High Line, a
1.5-mile defunct elevated railway on the West Side of Manhattan that is
also being turned into a park, were "the major legacy projects of the
Bloomberg administration."

The master plan is the most detailed version of a
proposal first put forward in 1996, when Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani
announced the closing of the landfill, the city's major repository of
residential solid waste since 1948.

The landfill received its last load of trash in March
2001, but the closing of the site, which is still controlled by the
Sanitation Department, was delayed for a year because it was kept open
to accommodate the debris from the Sept. 11 attack. Two earthworks, the
length and width of the World Trade Center towers, are planned for the
southwestern part of the site.

Although Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has committed
$100 million in city money to the project, only a small part of the park
will be open by the time he leaves office at the end of 2009. Three
soccer fields, known as the Owl Hollow and covering 35 acres, are to be
completed by 2007, at a cost of $6.5 million.

In a nod to the car-reliant culture of Staten Island,
the plan then calls for seven miles of park drives, connecting Richmond
Avenue to the busy West Shore Expressway, to be mostly completed by
2009.

The former landfill occupies 45 percent of the nearly
four square miles of the park area. The rest is made up of wetlands,
marshes, creeks, tidal flats, open meadows and woodland.

The project is enormously complex from an
environmental standpoint because of the decades it takes for trash to
decompose. Of the six giant mounds of trash at Fresh Kills, three have
been covered with a thick, impermeable cap, and the remaining three are
to be fully capped between 2008 and 2011.

The next step in the park's development is an
environmental impact statement, to be completed by the summer of 2007.
After a land-use review, the master plan will be finished and
construction will start in 2009.

Not everyone is a fan of the park. Benjamin Miller, a
former Sanitation Department official, has long criticized Mr.
Giuliani's decision to close Fresh Kills without an alternative landfill
or incineration plan to replace it. The city pays at least $300 million
a year more than it did when Fresh Kills was open, as a result of having
to pay trucking companies to haul garbage out of state, he said.

"I believe it is the most irresponsible decision a
mayor of New York City has ever made, in terms of the long-term fiscal
and environmental impacts," Mr. Miller said.

Correction: April 25, 2006, Tuesday An article
on April 8 about New York City's plan to turn the closed Fresh Kills
landfill into a park referred incorrectly to the harvesting of methane
gas there. The city has in fact been harvesting and selling methane from
the landfill since 1983; it would not be a new venture. The methane is
distributed as natural gas to property owners; it is not converted into
electricity.